Like all the brave concepts offered up by environmentalists, sustainable development was doomed to go the way of the rest of the treacherous lexicon of developmentalism - empowerment, participation, poverty-abatement, inclusiveness, and so on: ideas absorbed and redefined in terms amenable to privilege. Sustainable now means what the market, not the earth, can bear; what originally meant adjusting the industrial technosphere so that it should not destroy the planet has now come to indicate the regenerative power of the economy, no matter how it may degrade the "environment". Sustainable is what the rich and powerful can get away with.